The main purpose of this study was to understand the relationship with the cinema as a process of knowledge accumulation, knowledge construction and social distinction. With these appointments, we wanted to reflect on the possibilities of meaning that comes from the film as an experience capable of transforming the lives of individuals in that it focuses on developing them into his personal character and, therefore, participates in the structuring of their forms of see, understand and position themselves before the society in which they live. To meet this goal, we took as an empirical agenda / diary organized by an intellectual of Rio de Janeiro who, in the 1950s, documented her experience with film and recorded in this object, his apprenticeship with film. This agenda / diary reflects and documents practical experiences offered by film and related films within a framework that saw the seventh art as a tool for shaping the individual and a mirror reflection of society in which the organizer was part of the material . For empirical analysis were taken as reference the theoretical and methodological studies of personal diaries made by Robert Yinger and reflections of Norbert Elias and Carlo Gizburg. The results suggest that in the period in which it was organized in question, the cinema was seen as a source of knowledge considered legitimate and distinctive in the training staff, aesthetics and politics.